Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data takes much less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created uses the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is significantly better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.